Odd one out

Image by by Cynergist on flickr.com

It’s taken for granted in the world of advertising that human beings are thoroughly selfish. The ad gurus say it’s a tough call to get people motivated to do things that will benefit anyone apart from themselves or their immediate circle. It's an even tougher call to get them to take an action whose beneficiaries are a large and vaguely defined group - like ‘society at large’. And it's toughest of all to make people do something when the benefit arising from their action is as vague and unspecific as the beneficiary: ‘If you would do this, it would make ... er, society at large feel …er, generally better’ is no kind of sales pitch.

So climate justice campaigners have a hard row to hoe. They need to get an audience that is snoozing comfortably in their armchairs in the global north to wake up and feel motivated enough to change their lives significantly to make life better for strangers living on the other side of the planet, suffering from the effects of climate change - which many of the snoozers still regard as an unproven issue. Who is going to get out of their armchairs for that? ‘Big, vague, not related to me: nope, not interesting!’

It’s no good appealing to them by citing the huge number of people who could be helped by their taking action. Large numbers don’t make the case for action: they undermine it. Researchers have found that the greater the number of people who are expected to benefit from a giver's money, the less generous-hearted the giver's reaction tends to be. So if you notice a kindly woman about to contribute to a charity offering to help a poverty-stricken child, don’t chirrup enthusiastically about how her dollars will contribute towards helping thousands of children in the same boat - or her purse may snap shut.

What if the researchers were to point out this illogical tendency to the would-be givers? It seems that this knowledge can improve matters a bit - but the givers will still give less generously than if they thought they were benefiting a single individual. No wonder aid agencies stick to the hoary old convention of presenting images focused on just one person when they want to make you get your cheque book out.

But maybe all is not lost for campaigners who want to stop climate change worsening poverty for millions of people on the other side of the world. There’s another oddity of human nature noted by social psychologists that might come to the campaigners’ aid - and that is the drive to conform.

Most of us human beings have this powerful drive, whether we realize it or not. And it is extraordinary just how potent it can be, according to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the authors of Nudge.

They ask you to imagine yourself in a group of six people asked to perform a ‘ridiculously simple’ task of visual perception. Everyone is given a white card with a line drawn on it, and asked to look at three comparison lines projected onto a screen, and to identify which one is identical to your line in length. Everyone works on this individually and, as the answer is obvious, everyone gets it right. The experiment is repeated twice more, and everyone continues to get the answer right.

‘But on the fourth round,’ the authors say, ‘something odd happens. The five other people in the group announce their answers before you - and everyone makes an obvious error.’ So the question now is: What will you do? Well, I hope, dear reader, that you would stick to your guns and tell the truth as you see it, and not adjust your response meekly to fall in line with the rest of the crowd. But the evidence suggests that you might well cave in.

A social psychologist called Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in the 1950s that showed an astonishing proportion of people who had given the correct answer when answering on their own losing their nerve and switching to a wrong answer when others offered wrong answers. Thaler and Sunstein report that: ‘In a series of 12 questions, nearly three-quarters of people went along with the group at least once, defying the evidence of their own senses.’

Why did they submit to the consensus view? Perhaps the subjects felt there was something special about their fellow-answerers - maybe they had been introduced as... er... line-comparison experts. Or perhaps the others were senior colleagues or venerable family members they might not like to alienate. But no. The others were strangers the subjects were never likely to meet again. Our heroes had simply submitted to the consensus view, against the evidence of their own eyes, for no other reason than that intense desire to conform to the opinions of others.

Right now, this deep-dyed longing for conformity happens to be working against us climate campaigners, since we live immersed in societies that have not yet internalized the harsh realities of climate breakdown. But as soon as a critical mass of people do find the courage to drop the denial, then the conformists will find themselves immersed in a new ethos with new expectations.

Truth by conformity! It’s hardly the best way for people to arrive at recognising the risks the biosphere is facing. It would be so much better if people simply faced up to scientifically established facts about climate change in a straightforward and rational way. But, as TS Eliot famously said, human beings cannot stand very much reality. And if our inclination to conform, to follow the herd, can play a part in helping to save us from ourselves, perhaps we have to be grateful even for this small and bizarre mercy.

But it does mean that we have to link up and display the growing band of new climate realists as soon as possible - as we can on OneClimate's action maps. For until we do, the snoozers, the ostriches and the illusionists will get their way.